Dora and the hell of the concentration camps
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Dora — 1943-1945 — trip to the heart of the Third Reich ...
	1. Prisoners to build the rockets for the Third Reich 2. The hell of Dora 3. The Dora camp expands in size 4. The libération

The Dora camp expands in size

In March 1944, an external camp was completed to house the prisoners who worked in the underground factory. Dora was the prototype for a new generation of camps that the SS put at the service of the Reich’s weapons production. The factory’s technical supervision was the responsibility of engineers from Peenemünde.

In the same spring of 1944, the SS undertook, in a 20 km radius around the Mittelwerk, the conversion of new underground factories, designed for aeronautical production, which had to be protected from the Allied bombing. In October, Dora was officially detached from Buchenwald and raised to the rank of "main camp"; symbolically, it was then equipped with an incinerator…

The prisoners’ condition deteriorated abruptly during the winter of 1944-1945, while thousands of prisoners evacuated from the camps situated in the East (Auschwitz, Gross Rosen) flooded in, in a pitiful state.

The numbers in the concentration camp complex formed by Dora and its Kommandos rose from 26,000 to 40,000. Famine and epidemics reappeared: the mortality rate shot up again (5,321 deaths between December 1944 and March 1945).

The SS unleashed their violence against the German political prisoners and against the Russians (several dozen of whom hanged themselves); the horror of those last few months in Dora has been admirably depicted by the drawings of the French prisoner painter, Léon Delarbre.